ON THE
ANTHROPOMORPHISM OF "SALAFIS"

We understand something of the
contemporary scholar's impression of Ibn Taymiyya from the Tuhfat
al-nuzzar or "Travels" of Ibn Battuta, who relates:

"When I came to Damascus
there was a man called Ibn Taymiyya speaking about religious
science, but there was something strange in his mind One day he
was giving the Jum`a sermon and he said, ''Our Lord descends to
the nearest heaven thus," then he went down two steps on the
minbar and he said "like my descending" (kanuzuli
hadha)."

"They ascertained that he
had blurted out certain words concerning doctrine which came out
of his mouth in the context of his sermons and legal decisions,
and they mentioned that he had cited the hadith of Allah's
descent, then climbed down two steps from the minbar and said:
"Just like this descent of mine" and he was categorized
as an anthropomorphist."1

Ibn Taymiyya's conception of
Allah's bodily descent is also stated in his own writings, as
shown from the following excerpt from his al-Ta'sis fi al-radd
`ala asas al-taqdis, written as a refutation of Imam al-Razi
who was a fierce enemy of the Karramiyya and other
anthropomorphists: The Creator, Glorified and Exalted is He, is
above the world and His being above is literal, not in the sense
of dignity or rank. It may be said of the precedence of a certain
object over another that it is with respect to dignity or rank,
or that it is with respect to location. For example,
respectively: the precedence of the learned over the ignorant and
the precedence of the imam over the one praying behind him.
Allah's precedence over the world is not like that, rather, it is
a literal precedence (i.e. in time). Similarly the elevation
above the world could be said to be with respect to dignity or
rank, as for example when it said that the learned is above the
ignorant. But Allah's elevation over the world is not like that,
rather He is elevated over it literally (i.e. in space). And this
is the known elevation and the known precedence2It should be clear that the above in no way
represents the position of Imam Ahmad or his school. As Ibn
al-Jawzi reported in his Daf` shubah al-tashbih:`Ali ibn Muhammad ibn `Umar al-Dabbas
related to us that Rizq Allah ibn `Abd al-Wahhab al-Tamimi said:
"Ahmad ibn Hanbal did not attribute a direction to the
Creator."3